For a time Zephaniah Kingsley sat atop much of East Florida society as a wealthy mer- chant-planter and short-lived representative for the region’s newly created Territorial Council. Resigning his post in protest of the territory’s new racial laws, Kingsley quickly fell from favor and was the subject of much gossip and public ridicule. His sometimes “strange” and supposed- ly “quixotic” views on slavery and race have earned him a place in history, if mostly for their titillating qualities, oft-repeated today.1 North of Jacksonville on Fort George Island, thousands of visitors flock to see one of the plantations that he inhabited from 1814 to 1839. Owned and operated by the National Park Service since 1991, the Kingsley Plantation is a remarkable site of mastery, enslavement, and a great deal of mythmaking. In his day Zephaniah Kingsley helped to create several enduring versions of himself that continue to leave posterity confused, enthralled, and sometimes horrified. In the century following his 1843 death, told and retold as little more than bits of gossip for the curious listener, Kingsley’s life and exploits reached legendary propor- tions. The image grew from the stuff of romanticized Florida legend to national myth, bought and sold to unsuspecting tourists down to the present day.2
1 See his essential published collection of works found in Daniel W. Stowell, ed., Balancing Evils Judi-
ciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000).
2
This chapter draws much inspiration particularly from the opening sentiments of Tracy J. Revels, Jay Bushnell, Jean B. Stephens, and Daniel L. Fountain. See Revels, Sunshine Paradise: A History of Florida Tourism (Gainesville: University Press, of Florida, 2011); Bushnell, “Northeast Florida Plantation Overview,” Florida An- thropologist 56 (September 2003): 1; Stephens, “Zephaniah Kingsley and the Recaptured Africans,” El Escribano: The St. Augustine Journal of History, 15 (1978): 71-76; and Daniel L. Fountain, “The Ironic Career of Zephaniah Kingsley,” Southern Historian 17 (1996): 34-44. See also George R. Fairbanks, Florida, Its History and Its Ro- mance: The Oldest Settlement in the United States, Associated with the Most Romantic Events of American History,
When Zephaniah Kingsley unexpectedly died in New York City on 13 September 1843, he did so at a time when his persona had already assumed the quality of a local shadow figure amidst an emerging romantic period in East Florida’s history. Various stories about the man and his exploits had circulated for years, providing a basis for later tales.3 During his own lifetime distortions were very much part of the Kingsley story. For example, an 1840 Tallahassee news- paper reported:
Zepheniah [sic] Kingsley was the wealthiest man in East Florida; he was an avowed and open Abolitionist and Amalgamationist, and published a pamphlet in favor of both, and PRACTISED his principles, having a negro wife and several children by her—but was forced by the local legislation of the Territory, a few years since, to shift himself off to Hayti. It is said, he was, in early life a—slave trader! He now returns, once or twice a year, from the West Indies, to see to his property. He has many friends and connexions in the East.4
This sensationalized editorial had erred greatly. Kingsley never permanently left Florida. Alt- hough periodically visited Haiti, he continued to reside at his San Jose plantation in Jackson- ville.5
These were anxious times in Florida. The long and destructive war with the Seminoles ravaged Florida between 1835 and 1842, disrupting nearly all facets of life in the process. Post- war optimism flourished. In the years that followed, East Florida experienced significant demo- graphic and economic growth until the Civil War. A wartime land and building boom within St.
Under the Spanish, French, English, and American Flags, 1497-1901, Second Revised Edition (Jacksonville, FL: H. and W.B. Drew Company, 1901).
3
“For the Register and Observer. Notes of an Invalid.—No. 9” featured “The Rich Mr. K. with His Black Consort and Offspring,” Christian Register and Boston Observer, 30 September 1837 (Boston, MA); The Floridian, 4 April 1840 (Tallahassee, FL); “‘Vindex’ on Abolitionism!: The Long Shot from Castle Hill,” The Crisis, 18 April 1840 (New Orleans, LA); Lydia Maria Child, “Letter from New-York, 23,” (7 July 1842) in Balancing Evils Judi- ciously, ed. Stowell, 107-12; “Kingsley’s Plantation,” Emancipator and Free American, 1 September 1842 (Boston, MA); East Florida Herald and Southern Democrat , 23 January 1843(St. Augustine, FL).
4
The Floridian, 4 April 1840 (capitalization in original).
5 Zephaniah Kingsley to General Joseph M. Hernandez, San Jose, St. Johns River, E[ast] F[lorida], 12 Au-
Augustine gave way to a more dynamic regional growth after 1842. These flush times were built upon an economy propelled by a recovering agricultural industry in cotton, sugar, and citrus, while other avenues like transportation, banking, and a lucrative tourism industry now thrived.6
Nineteenth-century visitors came to East Florida from far and wide as they had in prewar years, according to George E. Buker, as “a haven for travelers seeking the unusual, and invalids seeking a healthy climate.”7 Some arrived by the steamships that now regularly cruised up and down the winding St. Johns River. These travelers often marveled at what many regarded as the exotic and more “foreign” elements left of Florida’s Spanish past. They sought out sites such as St. Augustine’s Castillo de San Marcos (then called Fort Marion), an “old” and impressive Span- ish fortress dating from the late seventeenth-century, and the surrounding town laid out in narrow streets with its blending of architectural styles, varied peoples, and assorted tongues. Locals en- tertained these growing numbers with an infectious blend of truth and fiction from Florida’s long history, ripe with incredible tales of local characters at times romantic and mysterious, though sometimes of the more sinister variant.8
The Kingsley story did not simply appear overnight; it had to be made palatable for con- sumption. As historian Frank Marotti has perceptively demonstrated, the romanticized Spanish past emerged gradually during the long decade of warfare in East Florida that coincided with an ongoing process to rectify claims stemming from losses that former Spanish subjects suffered in
6 Revels, Sunshine Paradise, 12, 31, 48; Tim Hollis, Glass Bottom Boats & Mermaid Tails: Florida’s Tour-
ist Springs (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books); Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 Vols. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933), 2: 733-34, 737.
7
George E. Buker, “The Americanization of St. Augustine, 1821-1865” in The Oldest City: St. Augustine, Saga of Survival, ed. Jean Parker Waterbury (St. Augustine, FL: The St. Augustine Historical Society, 1983), 170- 71, 171 (quote).
8 See the letters of George Bancroft reproduced in Patricia Clark, ed., “‘A Tale to Tell from Paradise Itself’:
George Bancroft’s Letters from Florida, March 1855,” Florida Historical Quarterly 48 (January 1970): 264-78; Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 348-52.
the Patriot War three decades before. It was a rebellion involving the armed occupation of East Florida by Georgia militia, U.S. soldiers, and frontier banditti. Much of the plantation landscape, including Kingsley’s own lucrative properties, literally went up in flames when Spanish authori- ties involved loyal Seminole warriors in their attempts to end the ruinous conflict.9 Many white and black Floridians later came to glorify life in Spanish Florida before the conflict, with their stories bound together by what he calls a “memory-chain of suffering.”10 The United States gov- ernment, it was reasoned, represented a menace to that shared idealized vision and was the pri- mary culprit of its demise. Fresh hostilities experienced in the Second Seminole War, says Ma- rotti, clouded the way people remembered Spanish rule. Whites and blacks alike could turn that particular portrait into material gain, though only in collusion with the other. For example, both sides could testify for the other in court proceedings in order to bolster their respective claims for remuneration from the U.S. Courts.11 White slaveowners advanced that slave mastery was somehow benign under Spain, which was an idea that proved an enduring selling point of the Spanish story down to the present.12 To the postwar story told by former southern slaveholders,
9 Rembert Patrick, Florida Fiasco: Rampant Rebels on the Georgia-Florida Border, 1810-1815 (Originally
published 1954; reprint Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); James G. Cusick, The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of Spanish East Florida (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); J. C. A. Stagg, Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776-1821 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
10
Frank Marotti, The Cana Sanctuary: History, Diplomacy, and Black Catholic Marriage in Antebellum St. Augustine, Florida (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 46 (term), 50, 104-06. Patricia C. Griffin, ed., The Odyssey of an African Slave, By Sitiki (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 120-43, notes another context as well, when former slave “Uncle Jack” Smith (or Sitiki, his given African name) remembered Spanish rule in East Florida more favorably at a time when the town had barely emerged from the ravages of the U.S. Civil War.
11 This was possible under terms of the Adams-Onis Treaty signed in 1819 recognizing the rights of former
Spanish subjects. Philip Coolidge Brooks, Diplomacy and the Borderlands: The Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 (New York: Octagon Books, 1970).
12 This point is discussed in Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross, “Comparative Studies of Law, Slav-
ery, and Race in the Americas,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6 (2010): 469-85; and Leslie B. Rout, Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 92-95, 314. If the work of Frank Tannenbaum (Slave and Citizen, 1947) is relevant for East Florida, its broad thesis would be limited only to St. Augustine and not the plantations. Kingsley himself noted in his Treatise that he
East Florida’s own variant actually complemented the notion of what Margaret Abruzzo calls a “proslavery humanitarianism” that fervently denied slavery’s cruelty and sought to recast the basic master-slave relationship as “positively benign.”13 Complicit in many cases throughout the antebellum era were black Floridians who could and did use slaveholding paternalism “as a weapon in order to evoke and attach themselves to whites’ mental images of a Spanish golden age that wonderfully blended with the romanticism sweeping late-antebellum Florida.”14 While it is certainly true that some black Floridians sought and gained important protections for their families, a persistent idea of white benevolence flourishing under Spanish rule came to identify and distinguish East Florida from its neighbors both in-state and out.15
These elements as well came to define the Kingsley Myth at least after the American Civ- il War and Reconstruction periods. All but ruined by warfare and Union occupation, East Flori- da lobbied vigorously to attract outside investors and boost local commerce by promising cheap land and a welcome respite from the cold northern winters. More unpleasant elements still lin- gered, however, with white violence and the intimidation of black Floridians now both routine and bad for business.16 In spite of these factors Jacksonville came to replace St. Augustine as a
diligently policed outside influences. Most plantation slaves would not have been “able to connect to the economy and institutions of a city such as St. Augustine.” Likewise her assumption that “the paternal model of plantation management, even on the largest Florida plantation” (p.2) is not only dated (Genovese, circa 1974) but reflects a simplified understanding of slaveholding paternalism generally. The utter lack of talk about slave resistance on Kingsley’s plantations is glaring and distorting. Antiquated definitions hinder reevaluation of Florida’s plantation past. On these points I depart from the conclusions of Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 2.
13
Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 2011), 231-33; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 214-20.
14
Marotti, Cana Sanctuary, 163.
15 Ibid., 150, 156-57.
16 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the
Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 208, 286, 331, 454, 454, 457.
commercial and cultural center, representing something of a more “modern” space within an oth- erwise untamed frontier region. If East Florida’s enthusiastic embrace of northern capital was not enough, its local legends and colorful versions of the Florida past made the region attractive to newcomers and tourists who came in greater numbers than ever before. They were encour- aged by a postwar print culture that “[sent] reporters to observe and report on this paradise.”17 The life and legend of Zephaniah Kingsley was one of the more well-known stories fed to these arrivals. Along with myriad artifacts and souvenirs that tourists took home with them, Kings- ley’s allegedly wild exploits also made for titillating topics of conversation for the return trip.18
A writer from Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, Julia Dodge, was perhaps first to nationally publish much of what came to pass as the Kingsley Legend in September 1877. Meant to attract visitors to East Florida and to appeal to postwar sentiments about the Old South, Dodge’s piece referenced the late Kingsley’s one-time residence at Fort George Island. It was, she said, “as good a specimen of the old-time plantations of the better class as can be found in the South.” What most appealed to her was its link to “many a strange and romantic story.” There she found tales abound of “dark deeds and terrible calamities...handed down among the always supersti- tious negroes,” the likes of which still could then be found in the area. “Longer ago, however, than any of these people now living can remember, this old plantation was the scene of a strange romance.” The author wrote of “the lonely life” of a young, unnamed planter and slave trader
17
Jerrell H. Shofner, “Reconstruction and Renewal, 1865-1877,” in The New History of Florida, ed. Gan- non, 257 (quote), 259.
18 Kingsley’s Treatise continued to be a source of criticism in northern antislavery publications up trough
the 1850s. See William Goodell, The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice: Its Distinctive Features Shown by its Statutes, Judicial Decisions, and Illustrative Facts, Second Edition (New York: American and Foreign Anti- Slavery Society, 1853), 370; William Jay, Miscellaneous Writings on Slavery (Boston: John P. Jewett & Company, 1853), 53.
On Florida’s tourist strategy related to its slavery past see Kenneth Goings, “Aunt Jemima and Uncle Mose Travel the USA: The Marketing of Memory Through Tourist Souvenirs,” International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Administration 2 (2001): 131-61, especially 136-37.
“struck with the grace and beauty” of an African chief’s daughter, then “a child of ten years old.” The plantation owner was able to buy her, according to the legend, because the child’s “savage father” was “unable to resist the glitter of the white man’s gold…” Keeping within the limits of white patience in interracial matters (though clearly not bothered by a girl of ten years old bought by a man nearly four times her age), Dodge’s narrative recounted that the young African slave had, “according to tradition, with the exception of a dark skin, none of the usual negro character- istics.” Her behavior and presence were likewise in accordance with her royal upbringing. The so called “dusky princess” she said had been in charge of the plantation during the planter’s “long and frequent absences.” Dodge could only speak vaguely for much of the material, vague- ly remembering:
One old negro, who died some time since, so old that no one could remember him as other than old, used to tell how he was brought over when young to this island, where he had lived ever since, and how he and others, sick and exhausted, were ministered to by the “missis’” own hands, and how they all loved her and always prayed, “Lord bless Ma’am Hannah!” Every morning as she stood upon this very spot the field hands passed in review before her, each gang with its driver, going to their daily work. She inspected them all, picking out such as were unfit for la- bor and sending them to the hospital or to lighter tasks; and every night in the same spot she heard a report of the day, examined into all complaints, and with strict justice adjudged each offender’s punishment; and without her order not a lash could be given.
Conveniently, no one could verify the story, she informed readers. “Master, mistress and slaves all went to dust long ago,” Dodge concluded. A story filled with royalty and romance on a ma- jestic island now awaited visitors to complete the picture.19
Fort George Island attracted intrigued tourists to the former grounds of the Kingsley fam- ily during these times. In a sweeping 1878 account of plantations littered along the Sea Islands
19 Julia Dodge, “An Island of the Sea,” Scribner’s Monthly Magazine 5 (September 1877): 659-60. An
account of the sketches done by artist Thomas Moran to accompany Dodge’s article is in Thurman Wilkins and Car- oline Lawson Hinkley, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains (Second Edition: Revised and Expanded) (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 154-58. Julia Dodge is listed in many accounts also as Julia E. or Julia B. Dodge.
from South Carolina to Florida, author S. G. W. (Samuel Greene Wheeler) Benjamin of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine added to the basic story written in Dodge’s article of the previous year, although apparently supplemented it in large part by the plantation’s latest owners, the Rollins family, who purchased the property in 1869. The plantation changed hands several times since the late antebellum era, and the owners no doubt retained bits of tales from its revolving popula- tion of black tenant farmers. Recounting the plantation’s early owners, Benjamin enticed his readers with the uniqueness of its past as “a sugar and cotton growing and negro-breeding island, and, isolated by their position, to a certain extent defied public opinion, if not the laws, and were, in deed, like feudal lords, clothed with a brief but undisputed authority.” He offered his readers, who were mentally and physically very far removed from the American South, a view of the grounds, its impressive foliage, and reminders of slavery. According to tradition there were “several hundred slaves” buried on the property, said Benjamin, but their unsightly gravestones apparently irked Mrs. Rollins enough to cause their removal. The area at the time eerily yielded “heavy crops.” Other sobering reminders of human suffering, however, were not so easily cov- ered up. More than two dozen ivy-draped slave cabins lay nearby in various stages of decay, while the brute image of stockades could still be seen in the plantation’s barn.20
Like Dodge before her, Benjamin did not long dwell on the more unsettling facets of the plantation’s past. Newspaper editors and a vibrant tourist industry did not hope to draw visitors with stories of the morbid variety. Romance was a much easier sell. Remade on something of a